[close] Brian Henry's poetry, which the Times Literary Supplement has described as "strange and compulsive," takes a dark turn in Quarantine, his fourth book. Lying in a field beside his dead wife and son, the narrator of this book-length poem describes the events leading up to his and his family's death. Quarantine is ostensibly set outside London in 1665, during the bubonic plague, but the motives of the narrator eventually cast doubt onto his story, as does the fact that plague victims often become delirious and may lapse into a coma before death. His story accumulates via accretion and contradiction, complicating his attempts to truthfully describe his life. Like its narrator, Quarantine turns in on itself even as it tells a story. The manuscript was awarded the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2003.

"In this ghostly, dead man's series, a stark world of violence and disease arises like a reworking of The Seventh Seal. Quarantine's language is robed in history's strange temporality, running back and forth, hitting the present again and again. Yet, curiously, it is a book without time or place—the river is any river, the plague is any plague, and the time clearly could be now." —Eleni Sikelianos [close]